This point gets made every time we have one of these give-me-legal-advice Ask Slashdots. It's vaguely possible that the submitter hasn't heard this before. But why do the editors refuse to hear it?
Well... does 'Ask Slashdot' really exist in order to benefit the person asking the question? Or is it to give all us Slashdot readers/posters an excuse to say 'IANAL, but...' and then pontificate on how we think the law works and how we think the law OUGHT to work?
Which one is likely to make more money for Slashdot and its parent companies and business partners?
just think of actually having the chance to get your hands on one of those assholes
Obviously the jerk walking around town putting fake parking tickets on cars isn't going to be the ringmaster of the operation. He's going to be just some guy trying to make a few dollars.
I'd like to think that enough people are moral enough to know that this is wrong, and the rest will figure it out after being arrested for impersonating a police officer, that the efficacy of this infection vector will quickly fall to zero.
And only has the police cooperation for their gunpoint audits within the United States, which isn't going to do much good when the non-compliant office is located in Beijing.
Even with that concession, I was the only person they could find on the continent (no one in the region at all, big metropolitan area, and no one on the -continent- who was willing to move).
If a company can only find one candidate per CONTINENT that's qualified (or even just almost-qualified) for a position, I think that's a pretty clear sign of unrealistic expectations. Perhaps they should have been trying to hire two people, each with half of the qualifications, and have them work in a team?
I don't know what's more disturbing about your story: that you worked on an optimization for a shell command that does nothing more than print a string and idle a single-user system until the Any Key is pressed, or that management was initially so impressed with your work that they considered giving you a promotion.
The reason is simple - every time he goes off on one of his insane ramblings, news sites and services cover it and give his voice an audience. Until people stop caring what he has to say, he'll keep saying things. Unfortunately.
And how is that working out for him, so far?
Sure, he's been disbarred, he's trashed his livelihood and his reputation, and he has become the laughingstock of both the legal and entertainment industries -- but since someone is still printing his NAME on a WEB SITE, he must be WINNING!
If you have the slightest knowledge of how media cartels work, not just American ones but World wide, then you know it was just a matter of time before market segmentation reared its ugly head onto the web.
And that time was right around when RFC 1591 was adopted, fifteen years ago. What other reason for ccTLDs could there be -- for television shows to contribute to the Tuvan economy by reserving a vanity *.tv domain?
The Internet may be the same all over, but the laws its users are compelled to abide by are not. Segmentation can and will exist on the network as long as any locality is capable of determining its own laws.
If you use my shovel to build your playground, you damn better let me play too.
Oh wow. This is one of the worst free software metaphors I've seen in a long time.
BSD: A man puts a shovel out by the curb with a note that says 'free'. His neighbor comes along and takes the shovel, uses it to build a playground. The first man has no claim on the playground.
GPL: A man offers to let his neighbor use his shovel, as long as certain conditions are met. If the playground is open to the public, the neighbor has to put up a sign that says "Built with Joe's Shovel", and offer copies of the blueprints and loan out the shovel to anybody who requests them. If the playground is private, it would be nice of the neighbor to share his work with everyone else, especially the shovel owner, but he is under no obligation to.
Even then, the distinction between tools and building materials is poorly made, but let's save that for the GPL vs. LGPL flamewar taking place over in another thread.
Due to the loss in revenue to Google, this would never happen.
Oh, c'mon, it's only Italy. While I don't doubt that Google would make less money if they stopped providing service to the country, it wouldn't be enough to threaten their finances. They could probably do fine without the entire EU if they chose to.
The real reason they won't do it is their Do No Evil motto. Why should every one of Google's customers in Italy be punished for the behavior of an overzealous prosecutor?
Mega Man 9 demo, PS3: 63 MB -Mega Man 9 demo, Xbox 360: 88.7 MB -Mega Man 9 game, Wii: 8.3 MB
whaaaaaaaat.
Nevermind the question of why a recreation of an NES-style game takes 8MB on the Wii, when on the original console the ROM would have been at maximum 1MB -- why, on the other two consoles, is the program size again 8 times larger? For just the DEMO?
A goofy naming scheme is a bad idea when you're running over 100 servers in a dynamic environment.
On the other hand, a pragmatic naming scheme is a bad idea when you're a developer or some other worker who will only ever have to visit maybe five of those servers, but is made to type host names such as "SCBKNYDEVJ07" every day...
There's no reason not to have serious and goofy names both attached to the same machine.
Why the FUCK do they think I want their networking system along with their player?
Moreover, why do they even run an update service at all when I install iTunes, when the account it's running under does not have Administrator privileges and cannot install software?
If they wanted to do [a bunch of Bad Stuff], they wouldn't be so stupid as to make it an extension that's clearly visible in the Firefox preferences.
What kind of argument is this? "See, Microsoft is totally upfront about what they're secretly installing! All you have to do is open Firefox, go to Tools -> Add-ons -> Extensions -> Local Planning Office -> Dark Basement -> Locked File Cabinet..."
If you run Microsoft Windows then you accept that you run whatever software Microsoft chooses to put on your machine
That's not true according to the Windows EULA, nor in a pragmatic sense. The precedent has already been established that the OS can be configured to require the local administrator to give explicit permission for each patch to be applied; the outrage here is that this time, that choice was not offered, and the affected software was neither part of the operating system nor even a Microsoft product.
There's enough FUD surrounding Microsoft Windows without your contributions to it.
I bet the guys that built the ENIAC were thinking, "They'll never fit anything THAT powerful in a suitcase" too.
In that case, "never" turned out to be about 30 years, and would not have been possible without a series of technological breakthroughs (including, most importantly, the transistor).
In this case, somebody is saying that "never" is already here, in that sufficient technology exists to build the $10 laptop today. Even if it takes 3 years to get from prototype to production, it's still an absurd claim.
The TI-85 I needed for my high school algebra classes cost $90. A decade and a half later, that same model still exists and still costs $90. As far as I can tell, all they've changed in that time is the faceplate and replaced the proprietary serial connector with a USB plug.
If the graphing calculator market had followed the same price/performance curve that personal computers have, we'd have plenty of powerful $10 calculators today.
I can buy a netbook on Newegg for 250$... yet a laptop with a quarter of the power and less functionality can't be built for less than 200$ for the OLPC.
The OLPC's laptop may have a quarter of the processing power of your $250 netbook, but it also only consumed a quarter of the current. Price and performance were not the only factors considered when designing the XO-1.
Had he done that he would have sold enough of them to get them into the field and had money to continue development and produce them faster.
Open sales are great if you have the manufacturing capacity to deliver them, but the XO-1 project didn't. I guess you weren't involved in the "Give One, Get None" debacle of 2007; I didn't receive mine until mid-Spring 2008 because of their supply chain and distribution issues.
So who needs this OLPC stuff? * 3rd-world countries who need 10+ hours of battery life.
The charge time of the OLPC XO-1 has been somewhat exaggerated. (No hard feelings; it's marketing.) With a stock OS build, I can get 2-3 hours off a full charge; with some of the more experimental builds, it increases to 5-6. If anyone can get 10 hours out of a single charge, I'd plotz.
The XO-1 does have lower power consumption than typical notebooks, yes, but also a smaller battery.
* Computer illiterates who can use the icon-based OLPC interface and built-in social networking stuff
Implies that people are incapable of learning how to use existing human-computer interface paradigms. Each and every one of us reading this now learned how to use a computer without Sugar; who's to say children in Venezuela or Nigeria cannot do the same?
* People who don't have network infrastructure and wnat to use the built-in mesh network instead.
The XO-1 has a custom networking driver running a standard off-the-shelf wireless chipset. Mesh networking could be implemented on any non-OLPC computer with a compatible chipset by porting the driver.
* People who need to run their laptop off of a bicycle, solar, or Ox.
I don't really know the condition of electrical infrastructure in other parts of the world, so I can't comment on how important a need this is.
* People who use the laptop outside and need something rugged, but can't spend $1000 on a Panasonic Toughbook
Unless these people are 8 years old, the XO-1 is not a good fit for them (it is literally too small to type comfortably on).
Could the design innovations from the XO-1 be applied to other subnotebooks intended for a general audience? Sure, and companies like Pixel Qi (founded by OLPC's ex-CTO) are working on it. But those subnotebooks don't do anything to advance the OLPC mission.
I have preordered the Pandora console and I'm happy.
Great! I'm sure when children in the developing world go to school, their teachers will be happy to know that their computers can emulate every video game console prior to Nintendo 64.
OLPC isn't -- or shouldn't be -- a laptop hardware project. It's about enabling learning; the gadgets involved are at best incidental. This new interview didn't do anything to convince me that Negroponte understands the importance of communicating that fact, or even that he himself recognizes it.
I think what you are witnessing is consumers and businesses hurting because of the shrinking economy and a $250 netbook is looking mighty affordable to them.
Even more affordable: keep using the same computer I've been using up until now, even if it's four or five years old at this point, for a cost of $0. It's still 'fast enough' for almost everything I'd want to do, and if I start to run out of disk space, I can buy external USB storage for $100 per terabyte.
Anyone remember Windows 3.0 real mode, protected mode, and virtual mode? At least there was some excuse for that. But it had the beneficial effect (for Microsoft) of soaking up most of organizations' development efforts just trying to target, optimize, and SQA products for three different kinds of Windows
Well, sort of. It depended on how much importance the organization placed on continuing support of legacy (at the time, meaning 8088/8086- and 80286-based) systems. If the systems were all 32-bit, and did not need to run (any of the three commercially released) Win 2.x programs, Win 3.0 development could be focused entirely on 386 Enhanced Mode.
Here almost 20 years later, is the situation really that different? How much cruft in the OS, and how much wasted developer time, is due to the principle that a progressive OS project must continue to have full support for dying CPU architectures? (Even Netcraft confirms it...)
I'll be sure to do that, and replace them every 5 years when they run out of write operations.
Winchester drives, on the other hand, use a time-honored complex system of delicate moving parts, and last virtually forever. They certainly do not start experiencing sudden failures if kept in continuous service for more than 5 years.
"Slashdot Effect" is not a term used to describe an abundance of ad revenue giving your business a huge boost.
When your site is "slashdotted", it means demand for your site's content has far exceeded your server infrastructure's ability to supply it to the user.
Now, Slashdot Effect traffic is very much burst-shaped, so if you ever only got hit once there's no good reason to increase your standing capacity to 4000000% of its normal sustained rate. But if it happens repeatedly, it's a sign that your company is doing something right content-wise but you're not able to capitalize on it properly.
Slashdot Mirror
See. A. Lawyer.
This point gets made every time we have one of these give-me-legal-advice Ask Slashdots. It's vaguely possible that the submitter hasn't heard this before. But why do the editors refuse to hear it?
Well... does 'Ask Slashdot' really exist in order to benefit the person asking the question? Or is it to give all us Slashdot readers/posters an excuse to say 'IANAL, but...' and then pontificate on how we think the law works and how we think the law OUGHT to work?
Which one is likely to make more money for Slashdot and its parent companies and business partners?
just think of actually having the chance to get your hands on one of those assholes
Obviously the jerk walking around town putting fake parking tickets on cars isn't going to be the ringmaster of the operation. He's going to be just some guy trying to make a few dollars.
I'd like to think that enough people are moral enough to know that this is wrong, and the rest will figure it out after being arrested for impersonating a police officer, that the efficacy of this infection vector will quickly fall to zero.
http://www.bsa.org/ It is completely anonymous.
And only has the police cooperation for their gunpoint audits within the United States, which isn't going to do much good when the non-compliant office is located in Beijing.
Even with that concession, I was the only person they could find on the continent (no one in the region at all, big metropolitan area, and no one on the -continent- who was willing to move).
If a company can only find one candidate per CONTINENT that's qualified (or even just almost-qualified) for a position, I think that's a pretty clear sign of unrealistic expectations. Perhaps they should have been trying to hire two people, each with half of the qualifications, and have them work in a team?
I don't know what's more disturbing about your story: that you worked on an optimization for a shell command that does nothing more than print a string and idle a single-user system until the Any Key is pressed, or that management was initially so impressed with your work that they considered giving you a promotion.
The reason is simple - every time he goes off on one of his insane ramblings, news sites and services cover it and give his voice an audience. Until people stop caring what he has to say, he'll keep saying things. Unfortunately.
And how is that working out for him, so far?
Sure, he's been disbarred, he's trashed his livelihood and his reputation, and he has become the laughingstock of both the legal and entertainment industries -- but since someone is still printing his NAME on a WEB SITE, he must be WINNING!
If you have the slightest knowledge of how media cartels work, not just American ones but World wide, then you know it was just a matter of time before market segmentation reared its ugly head onto the web.
And that time was right around when RFC 1591 was adopted, fifteen years ago. What other reason for ccTLDs could there be -- for television shows to contribute to the Tuvan economy by reserving a vanity *.tv domain?
The Internet may be the same all over, but the laws its users are compelled to abide by are not. Segmentation can and will exist on the network as long as any locality is capable of determining its own laws.
If you use my shovel to build your playground, you damn better let me play too.
Oh wow. This is one of the worst free software metaphors I've seen in a long time.
BSD: A man puts a shovel out by the curb with a note that says 'free'. His neighbor comes along and takes the shovel, uses it to build a playground. The first man has no claim on the playground.
GPL: A man offers to let his neighbor use his shovel, as long as certain conditions are met. If the playground is open to the public, the neighbor has to put up a sign that says "Built with Joe's Shovel", and offer copies of the blueprints and loan out the shovel to anybody who requests them. If the playground is private, it would be nice of the neighbor to share his work with everyone else, especially the shovel owner, but he is under no obligation to.
Even then, the distinction between tools and building materials is poorly made, but let's save that for the GPL vs. LGPL flamewar taking place over in another thread.
Due to the loss in revenue to Google, this would never happen.
Oh, c'mon, it's only Italy. While I don't doubt that Google would make less money if they stopped providing service to the country, it wouldn't be enough to threaten their finances. They could probably do fine without the entire EU if they chose to.
The real reason they won't do it is their Do No Evil motto. Why should every one of Google's customers in Italy be punished for the behavior of an overzealous prosecutor?
Mega Man 9 demo, PS3: 63 MB -Mega Man 9 demo, Xbox 360: 88.7 MB -Mega Man 9 game, Wii: 8.3 MB
whaaaaaaaat.
Nevermind the question of why a recreation of an NES-style game takes 8MB on the Wii, when on the original console the ROM would have been at maximum 1MB -- why, on the other two consoles, is the program size again 8 times larger? For just the DEMO?
A goofy naming scheme is a bad idea when you're running over 100 servers in a dynamic environment.
On the other hand, a pragmatic naming scheme is a bad idea when you're a developer or some other worker who will only ever have to visit maybe five of those servers, but is made to type host names such as "SCBKNYDEVJ07" every day...
There's no reason not to have serious and goofy names both attached to the same machine.
Why the FUCK do they think I want their networking system along with their player?
Moreover, why do they even run an update service at all when I install iTunes, when the account it's running under does not have Administrator privileges and cannot install software?
If they wanted to do [a bunch of Bad Stuff], they wouldn't be so stupid as to make it an extension that's clearly visible in the Firefox preferences.
What kind of argument is this? "See, Microsoft is totally upfront about what they're secretly installing! All you have to do is open Firefox, go to Tools -> Add-ons -> Extensions -> Local Planning Office -> Dark Basement -> Locked File Cabinet..."
If you run Microsoft Windows then you accept that you run whatever software Microsoft chooses to put on your machine
That's not true according to the Windows EULA, nor in a pragmatic sense. The precedent has already been established that the OS can be configured to require the local administrator to give explicit permission for each patch to be applied; the outrage here is that this time, that choice was not offered, and the affected software was neither part of the operating system nor even a Microsoft product.
There's enough FUD surrounding Microsoft Windows without your contributions to it.
What happens if you get temperatures that are precisely inbetween 0 and 1 values?
I'd assume the thing that happens on an electrical signal path when you get a voltage that's precisely inbetween 0 and 1...
Maybe quantum computers will be really good at doing this.
Maybe, but there'll be no way to know if they are or not...
I bet the guys that built the ENIAC were thinking, "They'll never fit anything THAT powerful in a suitcase" too.
In that case, "never" turned out to be about 30 years, and would not have been possible without a series of technological breakthroughs (including, most importantly, the transistor).
In this case, somebody is saying that "never" is already here, in that sufficient technology exists to build the $10 laptop today. Even if it takes 3 years to get from prototype to production, it's still an absurd claim.
That is a cheap graphing calculator!
The TI-85 I needed for my high school algebra classes cost $90. A decade and a half later, that same model still exists and still costs $90. As far as I can tell, all they've changed in that time is the faceplate and replaced the proprietary serial connector with a USB plug.
If the graphing calculator market had followed the same price/performance curve that personal computers have, we'd have plenty of powerful $10 calculators today.
I can buy a netbook on Newegg for 250$... yet a laptop with a quarter of the power and less functionality can't be built for less than 200$ for the OLPC.
The OLPC's laptop may have a quarter of the processing power of your $250 netbook, but it also only consumed a quarter of the current. Price and performance were not the only factors considered when designing the XO-1.
Had he done that he would have sold enough of them to get them into the field and had money to continue development and produce them faster.
Open sales are great if you have the manufacturing capacity to deliver them, but the XO-1 project didn't. I guess you weren't involved in the "Give One, Get None" debacle of 2007; I didn't receive mine until mid-Spring 2008 because of their supply chain and distribution issues.
So who needs this OLPC stuff?
* 3rd-world countries who need 10+ hours of battery life.
The charge time of the OLPC XO-1 has been somewhat exaggerated. (No hard feelings; it's marketing.) With a stock OS build, I can get 2-3 hours off a full charge; with some of the more experimental builds, it increases to 5-6. If anyone can get 10 hours out of a single charge, I'd plotz.
The XO-1 does have lower power consumption than typical notebooks, yes, but also a smaller battery.
* Computer illiterates who can use the icon-based OLPC interface and built-in social networking stuff
Implies that people are incapable of learning how to use existing human-computer interface paradigms. Each and every one of us reading this now learned how to use a computer without Sugar; who's to say children in Venezuela or Nigeria cannot do the same?
* People who don't have network infrastructure and wnat to use the built-in mesh network instead.
The XO-1 has a custom networking driver running a standard off-the-shelf wireless chipset. Mesh networking could be implemented on any non-OLPC computer with a compatible chipset by porting the driver.
* People who need to run their laptop off of a bicycle, solar, or Ox.
I don't really know the condition of electrical infrastructure in other parts of the world, so I can't comment on how important a need this is.
* People who use the laptop outside and need something rugged, but can't spend $1000 on a Panasonic Toughbook
Unless these people are 8 years old, the XO-1 is not a good fit for them (it is literally too small to type comfortably on).
Could the design innovations from the XO-1 be applied to other subnotebooks intended for a general audience? Sure, and companies like Pixel Qi (founded by OLPC's ex-CTO) are working on it. But those subnotebooks don't do anything to advance the OLPC mission.
I have preordered the Pandora console and I'm happy.
Great! I'm sure when children in the developing world go to school, their teachers will be happy to know that their computers can emulate every video game console prior to Nintendo 64.
OLPC isn't -- or shouldn't be -- a laptop hardware project. It's about enabling learning; the gadgets involved are at best incidental. This new interview didn't do anything to convince me that Negroponte understands the importance of communicating that fact, or even that he himself recognizes it.
Out of all of them, "Family Dog" was my favorite "Amazing Stories" spin-off show that was animated and had theme music by Danny Elfman.
I think what you are witnessing is consumers and businesses hurting because of the shrinking economy and a $250 netbook is looking mighty affordable to them.
Even more affordable: keep using the same computer I've been using up until now, even if it's four or five years old at this point, for a cost of $0. It's still 'fast enough' for almost everything I'd want to do, and if I start to run out of disk space, I can buy external USB storage for $100 per terabyte.
Anyone remember Windows 3.0 real mode, protected mode, and virtual mode? At least there was some excuse for that. But it had the beneficial effect (for Microsoft) of soaking up most of organizations' development efforts just trying to target, optimize, and SQA products for three different kinds of Windows
Well, sort of. It depended on how much importance the organization placed on continuing support of legacy (at the time, meaning 8088/8086- and 80286-based) systems. If the systems were all 32-bit, and did not need to run (any of the three commercially released) Win 2.x programs, Win 3.0 development could be focused entirely on 386 Enhanced Mode.
Here almost 20 years later, is the situation really that different? How much cruft in the OS, and how much wasted developer time, is due to the principle that a progressive OS project must continue to have full support for dying CPU architectures? (Even Netcraft confirms it...)
I'll be sure to do that, and replace them every 5 years when they run out of write operations.
Winchester drives, on the other hand, use a time-honored complex system of delicate moving parts, and last virtually forever. They certainly do not start experiencing sudden failures if kept in continuous service for more than 5 years.
"Slashdot Effect" is not a term used to describe an abundance of ad revenue giving your business a huge boost.
When your site is "slashdotted", it means demand for your site's content has far exceeded your server infrastructure's ability to supply it to the user.
Now, Slashdot Effect traffic is very much burst-shaped, so if you ever only got hit once there's no good reason to increase your standing capacity to 4000000% of its normal sustained rate. But if it happens repeatedly, it's a sign that your company is doing something right content-wise but you're not able to capitalize on it properly.